Why Do You Run?

I recently came across this video (click to view)—a documentary, of sorts, following the Desert RATS (Race Across the Sand) 6-day stage running race in Colorado and Utah. The narrator of the video asks: “Why do these people do this?” There’s no prize money, and surely, lots of pain involved.

“Everybody’s either running from or running to something,” says one subject of the video.

“It’s part of my culture, and my family,” says another of his Navajo Indian roots.

I found the video moving, and provocative in the sense that it asks: Why do you run?

For me, running—especially on trails—is relaxing. Running might be physical work, but it’s the refreshing kind. A good run in the woods always seems to trigger a re-set button in my head. Bad day + good run = new me. Good day + good run = better me. Good day + bad run (for whatever reason) = still good me.

I used to do a lot of multi-day adventure racing, where you’re slogging across a landscape, sometimes painfully slow, sometimes painfully faster than you want to be moving. You’re carrying a backpack that you’re living out of, essentially: food, water, layers, emergency kit. You know where your essentials are: Band-Aids, Ibuprophen, chapstick, beanie. You’re traveling with a team of three other people, navigating by map and compass and lay of the land, and surely, you’re suffering.

But I loved the purity of these events. The only goal, for those few days, was to get from Point A to Point B. It was a strange vacuum of time and space, and even though it was very taxing on the body, it was very clearing on the mind.

I think running on trails in the woods still does this for me (without all the gear, the teammates, the compass).

And I’m wondering, what does running on trails do for you?

What drives you to enter events like ultramarathons (if you do), or shorter races (if you do), or if you don’t race…what drives you, simply, to run?